


God Save Me Rejection from My Own Reflection

by WatchMyFavesSuffer



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bulimia, Dean Winchester Angst, Depression, Eating Disorders, Other, Self-Hatred, i guess i just write ed!fic now lol
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-04-23 05:54:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19144885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WatchMyFavesSuffer/pseuds/WatchMyFavesSuffer
Summary: At 13, Dean already doubted the existence of God, but he never doubted the value of penance. That’s what this was: atonement. He finally knew what it is to feel free of sin.This is a slightly drabble-esque account, pre- and during canon, of Dean’s struggle with an eating disorder. (Title is derived from the song Bodies by Robbie Williams)





	1. Chapter 1

* * *

Dean had hated himself for as long as he could remember. After a while, it just felt like part of him; like knowing America's highways like the back of his hand or fighting the urge to check Sam's forehead for a fever whenever it's cold out. Besides, it could be a hell of a good motivator. Dean figured everyone needed something to keep themselves going. For someone less fucked up, like his brother, a general quest to be the best version of himself was enough to get him up in the morning. For Dean, it was self-loathing that did the trick. If he could only force himself to get through school by thinking about what a stupid worthless loser he was and how failing math would only confirm that he was utterly useless and a waste of everyone's time, that was better than nothing, wasn't it?

When Dean hit puberty, he had this major growth spurt. He had been a pretty scrawny kid, all tiny thighs and mosquito-bitten bony shoulders. All of a sudden, he was tall and broad, and girls took notice of his developing jawline, his shoulders, his bright green eyes. But along with the growth spurt and the new attention, he was hungry all the time. He became a fucking connoisseur of diner food, soon knew at least one diner with good cherry pie in each of the continental United States.

Of course, he couldn't just accept that and move on. Dean needed to pick at it until it bled. He needed to turn it over in his mind until it looked more or less like every other garbage, piece of shit thing about himself.

So, every time he ordered extra fries or bought candy at a drive-in, the voice in his head told him he didn't deserve to eat, that he was pathetic and disgusting and an embarrassment to his family. It wasn’t enough to actually stop him from eating. Not at first. He needs to eat to train, and he needs to train to stay strong and fast enough to hunt.

His bubble burst in a stupid health class in Wisconsin. Some overwrought PSA telling the class of bored seventh graders not to puke their guts out to lose weight. These were probably not intended to be instruction manuals, but that didn't stop him. Everyone said that using your fingers to throw up after you eat is a "problem", but they would proabbly say the same thing about him having access to firearms, or taking shots of whisky after getting scratched by a wendigo, so what the hell did they know about his life anyway?

So he tried it. And the feeling of emptiness was like... Well, at 13, he already doubted the existence of God, but he never doubted the value of penance. That’s what this was: atonement. He finally knew what it is to feel free of sin.

In high school, he joined wrestling teams at a handful of the high schools he attended. Enter: the scale. He loved the certainty of it: weigh-ins were always on Fridays, and the number in the scale was non-negotiable, unopen to interpretation, clear and defined and, as he soon discovered, controllable.

He tells some guys, just casually, teammates in Indiana. Considering how strict their coach got about food and weigh-ins, he thought there was no way anyone would object.

"Dude, that's definitely a chick thing." said Brad, who had dark handsome eyes and who effortlessly made weight before every meet, which made Dean want to throttle him for reasons he couldn’t quite account for.

"What, so if you eat too much you don't do anything about it?" Dean scoffed with a little too much bravado.

"It still sounds like a chick thing. We learned about it in health class before you moved here-- remember Jake, in eighth grade?"

"As long as you're not doing it to look like a model or whatever, then it's gotta be fine. Right?" Dylan, who is blonde and rosy-cheeked in an all-American way, asked.

"You sound gay as shit, man." Brad laughed.

"Whatever. If you want to get fat and have Coach totally wreck your ass, be my guest." Dean smirked.

* * *

 

Two weeks later, Dylan pulled Dean aside after homeroom.

"Hey, man, uh--Can I ask you something?"

"Yeah, as long as it's not about the trig homework," Dean laughed. A little too forced.

"Remember when we were talking about like... I mean when you told us... Do you remember that thing you said about like, barfing after you eat?" he finally blurted out, without making eye contact.

"Um...yeah. Yeah, what about it?" Too casual. He suppressed a wince and adjusted the strap on his backpack, which was suddenly very, very tight.

"Could you maybe tell me...how to do it? Like, I get it if you think it's weird..."

Was it possible that Dylan, strong, handsome Dylan with his dimpled smile, could have the same voice in his head that Dean had? No, that couldn't be it. Dean was a total fuckup, and Dylan was a real person with a real life. Besides, it wasn't a big deal, right? It was just something Dean... _did_ , it wasn’t an “illness” or whatever teachers wanted him to think.

"You know what? Forget I asked. I don't even know-"

“No. No, it's okay. I can teach you."

They stood awkwardly at the entrance to the bathroom.

“Uh, you first. Leave the stall unlocked and I guess I’ll just go in in a minute?” Dean scratched his head, like maybe his gnawing doubts about this whole thing would flake away like dandruff.

So he showed him. And when the coughing subsided and the last stall of the sophomore hallway men’s room looked like a Pollock painting, Dylan raised his head and grinned, his cheeks flushed, his eyes watering.

“That felt _amazing_ , dude,” Dylan slapped him on the shoulder and slung his backpack on.

He looked... triumphant. No, he looked _absolved_. Like a penitent sinner. A flash of recognition ignited Dean’s mind. He felt suddenly hollow and sick enough to vomit (well, _involuntarily_ vomit).

“Hey, Dylan?” He cleared his throat. “Um, just...stop if you ever like, cough up an organ, alright?” He laughed lamely.

And a month later Dean left, and it's still no big deal, it's nothing, just another worry he went over and over until it dug shallow grooves in his mind


	2. Chapter 2

  
It wasn't _too_ bad, he reasoned. He only threw up when he ate “too much” and the sick guilty feeling seemed like it might suffocate him, or when he ate before a weigh-in or before his dad let him tag along on a hunt, and that was just to take the edge off, to let him feel light and fast and unburdened again. He still ate normally the rest of the time.

Well, until John disappears.

It wasn’t The Disappearance, the one that split his life, BC vs AD style, and brought his brother back to him. This was just one of those times when John stayed away for longer than he promised. He did that sometimes, chasing down a demon or a vengeful spirit that’s just clever enough or cruel enough to lure him into a game of cat-and-mouse. Sometimes he was able to get the word to Bobby or another friend of the family so someone could watch out for the boys, but sometimes he wasn’t.

This was one of the times when the Sam and Dean flew solo; just a stolen credit card and a no-tell motel room to their name.

Whatever poor bastard who’s card they stole caught wise, reported it stolen, and the money dried up fast. Dean hustled to get a job, dishwashing or putting up drywall, but paying for the room sapped most of their funds, and more days than not the only food he got was the PB&J at the school nurse’s office.

He slid blankly through the blur of hungry days; slipping school to work, skipping meals so Sam could have the cereal he liked, feeling the compulsion to puke on the days when he eats three meals, because what kind of pathetic loser can’t handle a few lean days to save his family? but trying to beat down the urges because because what kind of idiot would just throw away money like that? He fought constantly with himself, ( _to_ _eat_ _or_ _not_ _to_ _eat_ , like Hamlet if he were hopped up on diet pills.)

 _You_ _could_ _stand_ _to_ _miss_ _a_ _few_ _meals_ , he snarled bitterly to his reflection as the want tore his insides.

When John comes back and the trickle of food and cash slowly turns back into a steady flow, Dean still can’t shake the compulsion to be empty at all times.

 

* * *

 

During Dean's young adulthood, Sam's fights with their dad became more and more frequent. Dean's life became a map of deescalation tactics and escape routes. In his memory, these times are just a wash of love, fear, and hunger.

Sometimes it was just a matter of getting Sam out of the house for as long as possible. This meant a lot of tense dinners at McDonald's, diners, drive-in movies. Every night the same script:

  
Dean: You know, should be nicer to dad, Sammy.

Sam: snarky adolescent glare

Dean: crams fries anxiously into his mouth

Sam: complains about the lack of quality salads in this stupid town

  
When it gets too late, Dean would puke and pays the check and drive them home.

If John is on the warpath, Dean ate and puked in his room and silently prayed that Sam would have the good sense to bite his tongue and say sir, yes, sir.

If Dean made the rookie mistake of getting in the middle of one if their blowouts, that usually meant he got the shit slapped out of him (or kicked, or whipped, depending on how drunk their father is) and he wouldn't eat at all the next day, just staying in the room he shared with Sam in whatever safehouse they were inhabiting, doing crunches, cleaning and reassembling handguns. Maybe his father slipped food under the door (that Dean throws directly in the garbage), or maybe he didn’t bother at all.

When Sam left for college, Dean stopped eating altogether for days at a time.

It wasn’t all bad times, when it was just him and John. He missed little Sammy like hell, but the days just started to glide by smoothly, featureless and nearly silent, just cassettes in the Impala’s deck and need-to-know information about whatever monster they were hunting. No chick-flick moments, and if his dad noticed the water running or the sound of retching from the motel bathroom, he sure as hell didn’t let it show. His dad couldn’t understand computers for shit, and Dean learned that there were websites for people like him— well, maybe not _like_ _him_ , but at least he found people who knew how it felt, and how to stay alive while doing it. He learned to chew Tums before he vomited to protect his teeth, learned to call an ambulance if he pukes up dark brown blood, learned the signs of hypoglycemic shock and started carrying around a lollipop in the pouch next to his thigh holster, just in case.

And some weeks, the mechanical calm of loading rock salt pellets, burning remains, topping off the coolant as they cruise through sun-pounded Nevada— all the routines of hunter’s life— lulled him into enough calm that he was able to eat normally (or what passed for normally when his long-starved stomach demanded nothing but milkshakes and chilli cheese fries.) The smiles of the rescued, the warmth of whiskey in his stomach at the end of a long hunt, were something close to comfort.

But then Sam was back, and it was the two of them and the car and their two childhoods, worn soft into the leather seats.

...And then their father was gone.


	3. Chapter 3

In the months after their dad died, Dean mostly just slept. The twin ghouls that had stalked his life had been lain to rest: the big bad who had taken his mom, and the ghost of his father that constantly hovered over him. They left something like relief in their wake. He missed him, of course; missed him with the kind of ferocity that forced him to squeeze his eyes shut and wait for the agony to dissipate. The world made no sense without his father, without guidance, without the reminders he gave of what he owed to his family and to the world. He felt marooned, dizzy with the sudden strangeness of everything. Under it all, however, was the feeling that he had finally ended a chapter in his life, had shut and locked some door from which nothing could escape and haunt him again.

So, day after day, he would wake up, spend a few hours on his laptop if the motel’s wifi was working, exchange a few spare words with his brother, and avoid looking at everything that reminded him of his dad— his jacket, his car, his cassette tapes. Once he realized how impossible it was to make any sense of his life post-Dad, he would go to bed, sometimes in the early afternoon. Day after day, nothing had changed. The world was and would continue to be an unbroken stretch of gray.

Neither of them remembered to eat much those days, and the old obsession crept back in. His hunger filled his mind with a numb, dizzy blankness. He read trashy, sensationalized memoirs about anorexics, their stunning acrobatics on the tightrope between life and death, their empty stomachs and hollow bird-like bones. It took his mind off things. Sam thought that Dean was looking for leads, or trying to contact their fathers old hunting buddies when he sat in bed and stared at his screen. In reality (and Dean would have never admitted this, as shameful and horrifying as it was) he was usually looking at those secret websites, their pictures of skeletal bodies, their running calculators of calories in and calories out.

The quotations and oft-repeated maxims of the websites Dean visited were trite, and most of them seemed geared toward 14 year old girls (I mean, _Hunger is pure, starvation is the cure?_ Come on.) but it also had a way of getting under his skin. As Sam started to come back to life and they got back on the road, he found himself thinking of how pure his emptiness felt, how reborn he felt after getting rid of everything in his stomach. How holy the cords of muscle and trembling veins that emerged after weeks of starving.

* * *

What kills Dean, really kills him, is how his brother looks at him sometimes. When he's raving about pie or eating candy when he's supposed to be interviewing a witness, or stealing fries off his plate. Like he's an embarrassment. The voice in his head kicks into overdrive in those moments, _See, even your brother thinks you're a fat waste of space, not even worth the food you eat, just a fucked-up nobody—_

It probably just eats at him because of how _healthy_ his brother is. Sam is smart and dedicated and responsible, goal-oriented and disciplined. Sam eats salad because he cares about his health and wants to take care of his body. Sam _likes_ exercising, doesn't just run and lift weights to make it harder for monsters to kill him, but actually goes jogging and does _yoga—_ for _fun._ How the _fuck_ were they related?


	4. Chapter 4

The Midwest; a spate of poltergeist attacks. Sammy was looking through microfiche in an Indiana library. “Hey, Dean, this guy who just died went to Central High. You were there for a semester, weren’t you?”

“Um, yeah, I think so.”

“Did you know him? Name is... Dylan Snyder?”

His heart stopped, and he swallowed around the emptiness in his chest. “I think I might have met him, yeah.” He couldn’t hear himself over the ringing in his ears.

“Guy was barely thirty, paper says it’s a heart attack, but it came out of nowhere. Seem like it fits the pattern?”

Dylan.

Heart attack.

_Barely thirty._

“No,” Dean breathed. “Not a poltergeist.”

“You haven’t even read the article! Here, look. ‘Dylan Snyder passed on Wednesday-“

“It’s not a goddamn poltergeist Sam! Let it go, will you?”

Sam didn’t understand quite what was wrong, but knew enough to move on and keep his mouth shut.

* * *

Dean goes back to the library first thing in the morning. San wasn’t yet awake when he found his way to the newspaper archives.

_The Snyder family are gathering at their home on 331 Blue Acre Lane Monday afternoon to celebrate the life of their dearly departed son, Dylan James Snyder, following a ceremony at Blessed Heart Methodist—_

Dean knew the grieving don’t sleep well, and so the Snyders were more than likely holding vigil over a pot of cheap coffee, looking at and speaking of nothing. He took a ragged breath as he rang their doorbell, its chime obtrusively bright and cheerful. He asked himself yet again _just what do you hoped to accomplish here, you idiot? You practically killed their s-_

“Oh, hello _.”_ The woman was already dressed, but was wearing slippers. Dean grimaced in recognition— he, too, had woken early from nights of fitful sleep, forced himself to shower and dress, only to find he had nowhere to go, nothing to do.

He cleared his throat and reached into his jacket pocket. “Agent Don Sobol, DEA. I’d like to ask you and your husband a few questions if you don’t mind.”

“Well...sure. I’ll see if he’s up. Make yourself at home, Officer.” She walked gingerly into the back of the house, and returned with a worn, gray man in a tshirt and pajama pants.

Dean sat on their couch. “Would you like something to eat while you’re here? People brought by all sorts if cookies and things; you’d be doing us a real favor if you took some.”

Dean’s heart rate spiked, the way it always did when confronted with food he hadn’t meticulously planned eating before hand, or meticulously planned getting rid of.

_Really, Winchester? Thinking of your precious calorie count while Dylan rots in the ground? Take a cookie. It’s the least you can do, you toxic waste of sp-_

“I would love some. Thank you, Mrs. Snyder.”

He took a proffered ginger snap, not tasting it. He might as well have been chewing on ashes.

“As you might have gathered, I’m here to ask about the loss of your son.”

Mrs. Snyder’s eyes remained blank, but she gripped the cross around her neck just a bit tighter.

“There have been a few deaths in the area, mostly from cardiac issues, of young, otherwise healthy people. We’re investigating a possible connection to the distribution of methamphetamine throughout the Midwest. Was Dylan— your son, did he have any preexisting medical conditions? Or was there— was there a history of substance abuse, Mrs. Snyder?”

“Dylan— he was a troubled boy. I think he may have been on speed, I-I don’t know. But he was in and out of hospitals and things towards the end.”

Mr. Snyder put a hand on his wife’s knee.“Our son... the doctors said his cardiac arrest was caused by dehydration and electrolyte imbalance. Dylan had an eating disorder. Drugs may have been involved too, but his heart was weakened already. It’s— we didn’t tell many people because they don’t understand that men can have those sorts of...problems.”

Dean’s mouth is uncooperative and so dry he doesn’t know if he could produce anything more than a croak. He feels like he’s swallowing mud, his throat is so sore and constricted.

To his helpless embarassment, tears start to gather behind his eyes. He blinks them away and digs his nails into his palm hard enough to leave pale crescents in their wake. “I’m very sorry for your loss.” he finally manages.

“I know your son made...choices. Choices that hurt him, but if there is any way in which what happened to him could have been prevented, I will not rest until the people responsible get what they deserve.” 


End file.
